Torch Song: ★★★ BANG

 "This Time the Dream's on Me" plays as the curtain rises. Arnold Beckoff wants a normal life, or as normal as a gay, despairing drag queen can aspire to. His mother wants Arnold to grow up and get a real job, a wife an a child. Arnold wants the same thing, or so he says. But the dream is far away and no one is trying very hard.

Marin Theater's two-act adaptation of Harvey Fierstein's 1982 "Torch Song Trilogy," directed by Evren Odcikin, drops a few characters from the original, but the idea is the same. Arnold (Dean Linnard) sees the world through shmutz-colored glasses. He needs everyone to understand and respect him, as long as he gets to behave the way he likes and do the things he does to the people he wants to do them with. His mother (played by Joy Carlin) is still suffering from the death of her husband. Her suffering matters to her far more than Arnold's -- after all, he only lost his boyfriend but SHE lost a husband!

The innuendo is of Jewishness, guilt and suffering, a tried-and-true hat trick of New York  angst that Arnold and his mother's thick matzo-brei Brooklyn/Miami accents are meant to convey. Look! They're wearing the same slippers! 

We also have Arnold's current kinda-sorta love interest bisexual Ed (Patrick Andrew Jones), clearly a gentile because he is repressed and quiet, and Ed's wife Laurel (Kina Kantor), unable to make Ed stop thinking about Arnold, and Alan, the BoyToy, played with panache by Edric Young, and then, in a questionable casting decision, a grown man (Joe Ayres) does his best to convince us he is fifteen year-old David, a troubled gay teenager with the demeanor of an eight-year-old but the face and blue suit of an adjunct professor.

Maybe you just had to be there.

Fierstein's trilogy was a seminally important show for 1982. It still carries a lot of weight in theater circles. But for us, in 2024, this adaptation has big problems. Why would anyone love Arnold? Even Arnold can't stand himself. Why should we care about Quiet Ed? And Mama, for God's sake, Mameleh, is there nothing new that a wonderful actor like Joy Carlin can be allowed to bring into this role? 

There are many knock-out lines, like Mama's at the end: "A problem is never as permanent as a solution." And there are terrific staging pieces, such as the Four-way Fugue in bed, and of course the circular-waving cigarette in the dark back room of the bar. Let's not forget Arnold's fabulous opening (and only) torch song. We wish they would give us more of that. 

RATINGS: ★★★ BANG

The San Francisco Theater Blog Awards Division grants Marin Theater's "Torch Song" Three Stars with a Bangle of Praise for the one torch song we get. Dean Linnard can really lip-synch.

"Torch Song"

Marin Theater

397 Miller Avenue, Mill Valley

Through June 2, 2024

$39.50-$65.50